Personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri are everywhere, but have trouble handling any tasks more complex than setting an alarm or playing songs on Spotify. PolyAI is a new London-based startup with a next generation platform for building voice-based agents. We use machine learning to handle complex tasks across different application domains, in a wide array of world languages.

One of the highlights of 2017 has to be the launch of our Podcast, Women in AI. We’ve spoken to leading female minds from Facebook, Sightline Innovation, McGill University, Imperial College and many more. On each episode we speak to CEOs, CTOs, Data Scientists, Engineers, Researchers and Industry Professionals to learn about their cutting edge work and advances, as well as their impact on AI and their place in the industry. In our latest episode, we spoke with Layla El Asri from Maluuba, a Canadian AI company teaching machines to think, reason, and communicate with humans.

With the success of Amazon’s Echo and it's voice-controlled assistant Alexa, the smart speaker war is heating up to battle for the hub of home automation.
Traditionally, these devices needed to be operated with buttons, a remote, or other physical controls, limiting their capabilities. As AI becomes more mainstream and customers demand more from their devices, the need to become more user-friendly grows. Consumers want instantaneous responses without having to hunt down a remote, or get up to approach their device - the demand for far-field voice activation is just around the corner.

It’s no secret that machines are getting more and more intelligent. You can converse with an AI assistant online and not even realise that you’re not speaking with an actual human customer service employee. These virtual assistants are saving time, improving business efficiency, and optimising personal efficiency.
Until they’re not.
What happens when your assistant doesn’t understand you, or answers the wrong question? And more importantly, why do these miscommunications happen, and how are researchers working to overcome these obstacles in creating flawlessly automated personal assistants?

Coffee: check. Pastry: check. Experts from globally leading AI and Deep Learning projects: check.
This morning we kicked off the Deep Learning Summit and AI Assistant Summit with Fabrizio Silvestri from Facebook and Nikola Mrksic from Cambridge University giving us an introduction to the busy and diverse schedule of the two days.
The goal of this event is to bring together people with diverse backgrounds and to foster discussions and interactions around DL, not just to listen - Fabrizio Silvestri

“Do I need to take a coat today?”, “Play my workout playlist in the living room”, “Order me a takeaway.” Demands that your family might find pretty rude or tiresome, but perfectly acceptable to ask your voice and chat assistant. But we all know how frustrating these AI Assistants have previously been - you ask your phone to “Call Mom” and are answered with “Searching Google for Mom” - argh, no! We shouldn’t be to surprised, however, that the first generation of these assistants didn’t behave in the way we wanted them to. We were expecting our smartphones and household devices to understand our accents, colloquialisms, and emotions in the same way a human brain processes these types of information, when that is something that the machine simply cannot comprehend.

On 11 February we celebrated the 2nd annual International Day of Women & Girls in Science, in an effort to achieve equal access to and participation in science for women and girls. We spoke to Nandini Stocker, one of Google's leading women in conversational technologies, to explore how she came to work in this field, recent advancements in human-computer interaction, and predictions for the future of speech recognition.

With the increasingly rapid technological advancements natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning, development of virtual assistants and chatbots has exploded this year, and new applications are being explored everyday. One area of increasing interest is the improving of healthcare and medicine through the use of virtual assistants - we spoke to Cathy Pearl, Director of User Experience at Sense.ly, to learn more.

As technological advances in AI and robotics grow exponentially, can we expect to see robot butlers and companions becoming a normal part of family life in the near future? Tin Lun Lam, Founder & CEO of NXROBO, discusses social robotics, human-computer interaction, active perception and more.